It’s a rare side that sets up against Arsenal with a high press.
It can be done of course, not least because playing football in your defensive third is risky for any side, but you have to have the players capable of doing it in a co-ordinated and effective manor, as well as the players behind them capable of picking up the pieces if the worst should happen.
For all their commendable bravery, Bournemouth are not that side.
For the first 20 minutes of this encounter, the Cherries made a good go of it – largely keeping Arsenal contained into areas of the pitch that weren’t particularly dangerous for them – but, as the half wore on, the cracks started to show.
And when those cracks turned into ruptures, there was pretty much no way back for the hosts. They were overrun for the remainder of the game. Not only were they ineffective in attack, they were unable to truly get a grip of Arsenal at the other end of the pitch either. This was a genuine mismatch.
Bad for the hosts, of course, but brilliant for Mikel Arteta’s men.
I will confess to feeling a little trepidatious about this encounter, particularly with the volume of injuries we seem to be carrying at the moment. I feared this would be a real patchwork of an Arsenal side of the ilk we saw in midweek at Brentford.
In the event, however, there were a few more bodies available than i’d feared and the match was a good deal easier for them than it might have been also.
Still, it does continued to feel like we are muddling some of our players through matches at the moment, particularly Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka – both players badly in need of some rest, rest that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon.
Today, though, the team was excellent. Once they’d established a proper foothold in the game, the Gunners were irresistible and might even have scored more than the four they ultimately managed.
Strikes on the day came from Saka (inevitably), Martin Odegaard, Kai Havertz (yes, really), and Ben White, with an assist for Odegaard to boot.
The Gunners had plenty of chances to add to this tally – Emile Smith Rowe and Gabriel Jesus in particular will be disappointed – but you can’t score them all and there’s plenty more football to play this season.
What this match taught us, much as the PSV clash did, was that it’s difficult to go toe-to-toe with Arsenal and come out on top. In many ways, it plays into our hands. By that some token, however, it also means that most sides will set up much deeper and make our lives exponentially more difficult.
This match also showed us that, for an as yet unknown reason, we continue to show a remarkable sort of resilience on the road. This was another clean sheet and another dominant performance to add to those against Crystal Palace and Everton. Not the toughest places to go, I grant you, but they stand in stark contrast to the sort of toil we have seen at the Emirates.
If we could just replicate our away form in north London, we’d be unstoppable.
That’s a problem for Arteta and his staff to ponder on, however. For now, we can reflect on a job extremely well done and get these players into whatever sort of cryogenic freeze chamber is needed to keep them safe until Tuesday night. The matches just keep coming!
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